Your Skills

The skills you require to successfully pull off a training session can also be dependent on the training materials and the complexity of the topic. Throughout this course, we’ll be helping you to develop various skills that you’ll be able to apply so that you can consistently facilitate successful training sessions.

Here are some of the fundamental skills you’ll need to be a successful trainer:

• Patience
• Confidence
• Organizing and planning
• Active listening
• Leadership
• Questioning
• Interpersonal
• Motivational
• Decision making (unexpected things can happen on the fly, and you may need to make a decision quickly)
• Flexibility
• Analytical
• Public speaking
• Managing disruptions and difficult participants

Again, don’t be discouraged if you don’t possess all of these skills right now or if you’re not great at some of them. Skills can be acquired and improved upon.

Remember, the learning stages that we talked about in the Adult Learner lesson? These apply to your learning and improving on these skills as well. For example, let’s look at your public speaking skills.

Before deciding to become a trainer, you may have been unconsciously incompetent about your public speaking ability. Basically, you didn’t even know that you may have not been particularly great at it.

Then, you decided to become a trainer and realized that public speaking was important and that your skills in this area were lacking.

As you practice and develop this skill, you’ll start to become more competent. In the beginning, it’ll feel like it takes effort to be good at it. Eventually, after a lot of practice, your public speaking skills will be awesome without you exerting any effort whatsoever. It’ll feel very natural to you. You’ll be in the stage of unconscious competence.